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They are both just as good and all this feministic hoolaboola. It just annoys me.
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"Feministic"? The word is "feminist," and I'm afraid that Fordim's students are not engaging in feminist discourse.
Now, on to the actual topic:
1) what these women are talking about?
The divisions of literature into "women's literature" and "everything else" has been an unfortunate trend that we are not done reacting against, I'm afraid. As Lalaith pointed out, a lot of men and boys are still conditioned to dismiss books written by female authors and/or featuring female protagonists outright. I'm willing to bet that at least several of your students have, in the meantime, been conditioned to respond to male authors and male characters in such a way that perpetuates the literary gender divide, rather than addressing it in a meaningful manner.
Furthermore, and this is just a guess on my part, this could be just a sloppy attempt at literary criticism. Sometimes, when people have little to say about a certain work, they resort to thoughtless buzz-words and cliches.
2) why you like the book, despite your being a woman?
I actually bought the book so that I could read it out loud to my little brother, having heard that it was a great children's story. Well, what do you know, my brother was completely disinterested.
I, on the other hand, had read
LotR by then, and was intrigued by the origins of the story.
What really drew me in, however, had more to do with the fact that I'm a fan of children's stories and fairy tales and adventure in general. For me, these books serve a very specific purpose, they make me smile. The issue of not being able to relate to a certain [male] character never comes up. After all, I can't imagine my little brother being able to fully relate to a Hobbit who lives in a hole in the ground either. It seems to me that both genders ought to approach these tales with a set of demands that is much different from our expectations for writers such as Kate Atkinson or Vladimir Nabokov.
3) how I can present The Hobbit in class in such a way as to engage those women who find it so unappealing?
Well, I suppose if the initial hurdle really is gender, you can always ask the class what kind of books they do like. Does any one of these young women have a soft spot for, say,
Joanne Rowling and her lovely male wizard? Do they like Cervantes? Paulo Coehlo? Any of them enjoy Heaney's re-telling of "Beowulf"? Surely by way of these examples you can get them to see that one should first and foremost criticize a work of literature on its merit, as opposed to using gendered buzz-words to create a quick splash of controversy. If none of them end up liking The Hobbit, that should be perfectly fine (right?), as long as they articulate their reasons well and actually generate a thoughtful discussion on the topic.